As DC did before with its teen heroes Superboy and Robin in the 1940s, Marvel attempted to spin the Human Torch out into solo adventures in Strange Tales #101 (July 1962). The story itself is pretty forgettable, but they do establish a few facts: Johnny Storm is still in high school and is (somehow) still maintaining a secret identity – even though it’s widely known that his sister is the Invisible Girl and no one in the Fantastic Four wears any kind of disguise… oookay.
In this issue, Johnny fights “The Destroyer”, a saboteur who threatens an amusement park from finishing its construction. Why? He turns out to be a Scooby-Doo type villain, one of the very newspaper publishers who had been sent a ransom-type note by the Destroyer that construction should halt. Yeah but why though? Well … uh, he’s smuggling information to the Reds in a submarine parked off the coast of the amusement park… I guess. You can almost hear the off-the-cuff suggestions next to the Marvel Comics water cooler.
At least there was a nice cameo by the Thing and a re-telling of the Fantastic Four origin.